Okay, just because I don't want six months to go by on this forum without a thread on the relative merits of eating carp. . .

Been getting into some grass carp of late. Sometimes I give them away to folks fishing at the boat dock, but sometimes I like to keep them for myself. You know how you hold fish out really close to the camera to make them look bigger? Turns out I'm not strong enough to do that with two grassies at once.



A little tip, clean carp out in the alley so the missus don't complain about carp scales in the back yard:

You can see the crock pot in the above pic. My secret is to put the carp fillets in the crock pot for a full 24 hours. That melts all the bones and boils off any funky lake-bottom taste. Then I pick out any of the red/dark meat that didn't get trimmed from the fillets, and what remains tastes EXACTLY LIKE CANNED TUNA.


Now being from the midwest, I have a number of family canned-tuna recipes to turn to. One of my favorite is called a tuna reuben, even though it does not bear any resemblance to any other dish with the name "reuben", other than being a sandwich. Make a tuna salad with the carp, mixing together: carp, mayo, yellow mustard, Krenek's Bohemian all-purpose spice, and something sour like olives or relish. Spread the carp-salad on a piece of bread, and bake it with slices of cheddar on top. If you add bacon to it, you'll have the most Wisconsin dish ever invented.

Fillet it,Don't scale it. Just say'in.

Oh yeah, gotta discard that skin, but a lot of scales still fall off. I just took the hose and washed them over into the neighbor's parking space.

Hard pass.

When I was a kid my mother would make us kids that very same dish but she used tuna. I hadn’t thought about that in decades. We loved it. I’m going to make me some !

crock pot temp and quanity ? do you have recipe for smoking carp? recall back in Toledo in the 40's and it had a taste of like ham. have several in my boat-house that can be harvested

Interesting.

I am sure it tastes pretty good.

Thanks for sharing!

funny

@E B Lane, I had the crock pot on high for the first 12 hours or so, and then turned it down low for the next twelve. You definitely want to do the cooking outside. Just whatever water covered the fillets.


@doctorxring, yeah, my mom used tuna too. Do you remember what you called the dish? Everyone else in the internet seems to think a dish needs sour kraut to be called a reuben.

We've canned carp since I was a kid...........scale,chunk,place in clean warm quart jars,place in pressure cooker,90 minutes at 10 lbs pressure.Not quite as simple as I make it sound but it is well worth the effort. We eat most of ours as mock salmon croquettes but it also quite good straight out the jar with some hot sauce and crackers.......... believe it or not it is much more tasty than canned salmon ever thought about being.

Gonna have to try your crock pot method

We would use tuna and call it a Tuna Melt. I'm also in the camp that any variation of a ruben still needs sauerkraut and thousand island

Yep, right up there with anchovy casserole.

Beat me to it!!